Monthly Archives: June 2014

Given Away, Jennifer Barber’s second collection of poetry, is spare, meditative, thought-provoking. The poems illustrate what we hope for when we describe poetry as compressed language—for no word is wasted here, and yet the poems still invite the reader in. They are personal without being hermetic, lean without being spartan. They progress through implication and association rather than straightforward narrative, although a narrative of sorts does develop through the collection. As I read and reread this book, I found myself lingering over many of the poems, as if time were slowing, as if we—I, the poems, the speaker—could engage in a reality apart from time, even though the poems trace the speaker’s movement through time.

Barber accomplishes this paradoxical effect through her skilled use of the line, her fearless hospitality to the white space surrounding a poem, and her confidence in the power of the concrete image. The poems reveal their subjects as one deceptively quiet observation follows another. I found myself repeatedly startled by the accuracy of the poems’ references to the material world, and by the juxtaposition of objects I had never before experienced together.

Motifs of separation and connection dominate this collection. It opens with a poem called “Away,” and another poem of the same title opens section three. Section two concludes with “Three Days Away,” and the book closes with the title poem “Given Away.” Other titles also refer to this theme, “Proximity,” for example, and “Arriving When It Does.” The poems themselves explore the boundaries between one thing and another—light and darkness, language and silence, breath and air, a human being and God. And though we name separation—afternoon, evening, night—the poems often situate themselves in that moment when one thing is indistinguishable from the next.

The opening poem “Away” begins this way: “I count to twenty / and back. // The first day of the world, / light slanting through the trees, // though cities have been / built and destroyed / and rebuilt, / pollen and lamentation filling the air.” Obviously this poem is not set on the very first day of this world, regardless of which culture’s creation story one adopts. Yet the light slanting as it does recalls a beginning, even as history has intervened to create and destroy. The final line of stanza three, “pollen and lamentation filling the air,” evokes both hope in a future and grief at the past. Hope and despair are not quite balanced, however, since hope rests in the natural world and the “lamentation” proceeds presumably from human activity. The next stanza, consisting of a single line, returns us to the speaker’s present and also to stillness, to a consciousness of “is” rather than a concern for either building or destroying: “Not here. Quiet reigns.” The poem proceeds imagistically—a carpenter bee, a field of sheep, a hummingbird “who seems a twig from here.” Finally, the poem concludes with a metaphor that is, if not exactly ominous then modestly oppressive: “the wheel of August touches down.” This poem has stayed with me because the speaker is so attentive to her world. The poem is receptive to the things of this world, yet it permits them to remain what they are, translated into language, yes, and occasionally described figuratively, but not themselves reduced to handy metaphor.

As the collection proceeds, the references and vocabulary become increasingly Biblical, yet the poems are not, for the most part, overtly about Biblical passages. Instead, they demonstrate how the language of one’s tradition remains a living language. “In the Hebrew Primer” is a good example of Barber’s strategies. Much of this poem consists of a list of words, concluding with a simple conjugation of a simple verb, yet these sparse words reveal everything the reader needs to know. “A man. A woman. A road. / Jerusalem” the poem begins. It continues: “Nouns like mountain and gate, / water and famine, / wind and wilderness / arrange themselves in two columns on the page.” Studying a lexicon of a particular text is, of course, very different from studying a complete language, and if we were to study the Hebrew Bible, we would expect vocabulary like “famine” and “wilderness,” words that wouldn’t ordinarily show up on early vocabulary lists of a foreign language class. Yet a Hebrew Primer might also include words like “feast” or “riches” or “sabbath”; Barber’s selections imply a narrative that will be fulfilled by the end of the poem. The next stanza considers the other significant part of speech: “The verbs are / remember and guard; / the verbs are / give birth to and glean.” The concluding couplet circles back to the beginning while revealing where the beginning was headed: “A woman, a man. / I was, you were, we were.”

I appreciate Given Away for both its craft and its content, if those two categories can be separated. The language is absolutely controlled and absolutely natural. The poems are best read slowly, line by line, over a period of hours or days. And then when you close the book, you’ll want to begin again, as the world does moment by contemplative moment in these poems.

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I particularly enjoy anthologies that are conceived because of the editor’s interest in a topic, so when I saw a reference to St. Peter’s B-List before it was submitted to me for review, I was intrigued—for there are so many saints to choose from after all, and so many potential attitudes to express. It is one of those anthologies that’s just fun to pick up and browse through. Contributors include the well-known (e.g. Kate Daniels, James Tate, Jim Daniels, Dana Gioia) and poets who were new to me, though looking at their contributors’ notes, I wonder how I could have missed them until now. That’s a virtue of anthologies, of course, how they introduce us to poets we’ll come to love. There’s an equal range among the saints considered, from beloved St. Francis of Assisi, his companion St. Clare of Assisi, his contemporary St. Dominic, to the equally if differently beloved St. Patrick and St. Nicholas, from the Biblical St. Mary Magdalene and St. Joseph to the legendary St. Christopher, from the recently canonized St. Kateri Tekakwitha to the not-yet canonized Dorothy Day, from the famous St. Joan of Arc to the obscure St. Magnus of Füssen and St. Spyridon. Lest the obscurity of some of the saints intimidate readers, Mary Ann B. Miller has provided a helpful summary of each saint’s life, in addition to an introduction and contributor bios. The anthology is arranged in three sections, “Family and Friends,” Faith and Worship,” and “Sickness and Death.” Although many of the poems are interesting and memorable, I’ll limit my discussion here to one poem from each section.

The book opens with a Credo poem by Martha Silano, “Poor Banished Children of Eve.” It begins conventionally enough, “I believe,” and then develops through loose allusion to the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds,though its content quickly becomes, shall we say, unorthodox. Yet it is also highly reverent, spoken in the voice of someone who recognizes a blessing when she receives one. The poem is written in tercets without punctuation, and Silano exploits this form to surprise the reader, to create layers of meaning through the juxtaposition of anticipation against the unexpected. Here’s something of what I mean—the poem begins with this stanza: “I believe in the dish in the sink / not bickering about the dish in the sink / though I believe the creator.” Unlike any canonical Christian creed, this poem focuses immediately upon the concrete material world, as if to suggest that she remains unconvinced of an abstract, invisible, ineffable world. Yet she immediately mentions a “creator,” admittedly lowercase, but perhaps the missing capital letter corresponds to the absent punctuation. But no—the sentence is interrupted with a stanza break, and the subordinate clause that has begun at the end of stanza one is completed in stanza two: “though I believe the creator // of the mess in the living room / cleans up the mess in the living room.” The poem continues this way, mentioning purgatory and hell, father and son, martyrs and saints, glory and mercy, but returning always to her immediate family, their modest inconveniences and immense blessing. Its last two lines are nearly transcendent: “grant us eternal grant us merciful / o clement o loving o sweet.” The poem is skillful and imaginative. In gesturing toward doctrine, it becomes so much more substantive than rote recitation; it ends as the prayer of a believer, one who surpasses orthodoxy to express profound gratitude.

Not all of the poems in this book express such a convincingly present faith, but many of the most moving ones do. Nicholas Samaras’ “Apocalypse Island” is filled with humor and hope. It is a list poem, structured in couplets, that describes a day from the speaker’s youth. Each of the first six couplets contains the clause “I remember” or a close synonym followed by a concrete image—though only the first two couplets actually begin with these repeated words. Samaras introduces enough variety in the length and structure of his sentences so that the repetition of “I remember” becomes resonant rather than monotonous. Then, exactly mid-way through the poem, we come to two couplets that interrupt the pattern: “Halfway up the mountain path, we came to a sign / nailed to an olive tree, a white sign in the rough // shape of an arrow, inscribing ‘this way to the Apocalypse.’ And my stunned translation, hysterical with laughter.” Five more couplets follow, two of which include “I remember.” The pacing of this poem is masterful, as is Samaras’ superimposition of his own individual future upon that revealed by St. John and the simplicity of what follows: “I remember the coolness of the air as we entered // the chapel of his Cave—Saint John of the Revelation. / All of my future was ahead of me. I framed // the twine of flowers around the ancient gold icon / and walked back into light, both empty and full.” The speaker’s future is presumably no long all ahead of him, yet we sense that this experience opened a future that will not close.

As might be expected, many of the poems in the final section are more somber than those earlier in the book. “Rose-Flavored Ice Cream with Tart Cherries” by Karen Kovacik, for example, is poignant and wistful. The poem begins evocatively, “The June air’s woozy with unshed rain,” and develops through concrete imagery, addressing a “you” by the end of the first stanza, a “you” whose favorite saint was Thomas, the doubter, or as the speaker says, “your favorite saint, who had / to touch the wound of light to believe.” The speaker orders the ice cream of the title, so exotic as to seem almost impossible, “crisp as a chilled corsage, / fragrant then tart.” Only with the subsequent line are we certain the addressee is absent, and only in the third and final stanza do we realize why—the speaker is a widow, recalling the attentive erotic care of her deceased spouse. The poem concludes with an imagined gesture reminiscent of the first stanza: “I can almost feel, a continent away, / the flutter of your impatient hands.” It was Thomas’ hand, after all, that convinced him that Jesus was alive, just as a lover’s hands often convince us that we too are alive. Like many of the poems in this anthology, “Rose-Flavored Ice Cream with Tart Cherries” doesn’t examine the life of a saint so much as it achieves understanding of the speaker’s life through reference to the saint.

The poems in St. Peter’s B-List vary in length and form; although many are written in free verse, the anthology also includes several written in received forms. Most, however—and this is my only complaint—are stylistically similar; the personal lyric dominates the collection, perhaps through the editor’s preference or perhaps because contemporary poems incorporating references to saints are most often written in this lyrical scenic mode. If the latter is true, let it also be a challenge—what can we poets do next, exploring our relationship with the saints and their influence on us, to make it new?

Laura Long. The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems. Finishing Line Press, 2013. 26 pgs. $12.00.

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

What role do chapbooks fill in today’s poetry world? Are they just pre-books, a sort of trial run until a poet writes enough accomplished poems to fill out a full manuscript and then persuades a publisher to print it? Are they worth the effort at all, since many brick and mortar bookstores refuse to stock them? They’re hard to shelve after all, since there’s no spine, no place to print the title and author’s name aside from the front cover. Although they’re generally less expensive than full-length collections, they’re not that much less expensive. On the other hand, production values are often high—as material objects, they can be attractive, pleasurable to behold and touch. And when the poems are closely linked, the chapbook can be an ideal form of publication. Such is the case with Laura Long’s The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems.

Consisting of 21 poems, none longer than a page, this collection is “A Life in Poems” in several respects. Most obviously, it conveys the major biographical details of Caroline Herschel, whose life spanned nearly a century, from 1750 to 1848—that her mother had determined that Caroline would earn her keep through the performance of menial domestic tasks, that she escaped to England with her brother William, that together they created precise telescopes, that she discovered numerous stars and comets, that after William’s marriage she resided in boarding houses even as she pursued her astronomical passion. More importantly, however, these poems convey the imaginative life of Caroline Herschel, at least as her imagination is imagined by Laura Long. In these poems, Herschel notices concrete detail and thinks figuratively—though for her, every metaphor leads back to the stars.

Herschel’s associative imagination is most effectively conveyed in “The Eye of Caroline Herschel.” This poem understands Herschel’s mode of seeing almost as a vocational call: “I cannot stop how I see even though / sunlight floods in to blind me.” Then the poem consists of a series of visual images, ordinary objects whose form evokes the form of a comet: “a ribbon trails //from a woman’s sleeve, the tail / of a cat slithers beneath a chair, / a bloom at the loose end of a morning / glory vine wavers from the fence // into the breeze. I stare at the flowers / erupting from green. Each blossom / is a comet sprung from seed…” We can see now how each of these tendril-like items is reminiscent of a comet. Long’s line break at the beginning of the second stanza is particularly telling: “the tail / of a cat…” for other poems will reveal the process of astronomical discovery, often focusing on the presence or absence of a “tail” following a point of light. Finally, the poem concludes with a metaphor that is provocatively layered: “Every darkness / waits to be stung open by light, as a string / on a violin waits to be touched.” A comet does open darkness, does provide form for darkness. And a comet does resemble a string—at the end of the penultimate line, readers are expecting another item in the list of visual images. But the strategy of the poem turns here. The string itself, which transforms the darkness, is also waiting to be transformed, this time by a human hand. The list of visual images is completed by an image that is auditory and tactile, and the metaphor suggests that a comet, too, perhaps becomes most resonantly meaningful through being observed.

If “The Eye of Caroline Herschel” is among the most imaginative ones in this chapbook, the most provocative poem for me is the opening one, “Caroline Talks Back to the Poets.” Laura Long knew what she was doing, of course, in placing this poem first, immediately inviting her readers to an argument. I’ve long felt superior, as a poet, to the philosophers whose language is often so abstract and unmemorable. Years ago, I read a description that distinguished between the two classes of thinkers this way: philosophers praise the light, while poets praise the moon and the stars. But here, in this poem, Caroline Herschel suggests that astronomers are superior even to poets: “The poet can sing to a lone bright star, / but we astronomers look at all of them / and the shining nebulosity between.” Oh, you misrepresent us, I want to say. And then I could point to the figurative language of the poem itself as evidence of the value of poetic expression: “Poets, attend to // the river of milk braiding and unbraiding its hair.” But I catch myself. This debate is not one I believe in after all—the argument that science or art or any other creative human endeavor is more necessary or more valuable than any other. Ultimately, I think the poems in this chapbook reach the same conclusion, but by placing this poem first, Long provokes her readers to pay attention, just as she demonstrates through the language of these poems that she has paid attention to the world around her.

The collection concludes, not with Herschel’s death as would most conventional biographies, but with a summary of her life and a bit of further advice in the voice of her ghost: “Watch the glitter drift until dawn / erases the dark. Hunger for another night.” These lines reverse the stereotypic associations of day and night with life and death, yet they nevertheless express the longing so many of us feel, the desire to receive the world again, and again.

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Before I read a single poem, I suspected I would enjoy Amanda Auchter’s The Wishing Tomb. Simply by skimming the table of contents, I could tell that Auchter is a poet engaged with language, its specificity, the sounds of one word colliding with another. Here are some of the poems’ titles: “The Good Friday Fire,” “The Punishment Collar,” “Testimony of Evangeline the Oyster Girl, 1948,” “The Angola Inmate Coffin Factory,” “The Chicken Man Walks the Quarter.” These are not generic titles, the last resorts of a poet desperate for anything more creative than “untitled.” And fortunately, the poems are as interesting as their titles.

Like some other recently published collections (Lesley Wheeler’s Heterotopia and Nicole Cooley’s Breach spring immediately to mind), The Wishing Tomb focuses on a particular city, documenting in this case the history of New Orleans. It is divided into three sections, the first beginning with early European contact and proceeding through the nineteenth century, the second exploring events of the twentieth century, and the third tracing the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. The book is not, however, simply a history text broken into lines. The poems imagine the perspectives of specific characters, some famous, some anonymous, and the effects of catastrophic events on ordinary people. Not surprisingly given its location, the books overflows with water as a literal and metaphorical presence. Images and figures of speech echo each other from poem to poem, enhancing the collection’s unity, yet the writing is taut and requires an attentive reader. Individual poems also connect with each other to weave each section together, “The Good Friday Fire” and “The Good Friday Flood, 1927,” for example, or “Early Pastoral” which is the second poem in the collection, “Highway Pastoral” which is nearly centered, and “Late Pastoral” which is the final poem in the collection. As a book, The Wishing Tomb is as thoughtfully constructed as the individual poems.

“The Disordered Body” from section one illustrates several of Auchter’s strategies. It opens with a set of images that appeal to multiple senses: “Rain falls from the black skies daily, the city // a shroud of rot: garbage and heat and humidity, / the bright stink // of bodies. The body a branch after lightning, a language // of fever, delirium…” In the first line, the rain is comparatively neutral, even if the “black skies” are not, but by the second line, readers feel the weight of humidity and stench. The repulsion of the olfactory image extends into the next line, but then line four turns in a new direction, creating a visual image and metaphor that is almost mystical: “the body a branch after lightning, a language…” Eventually, with the mention of mosquitoes and suggestion of impending disaster, readers understand that this is a poem about yellow fever and the inevitability of nature’s power despite human intervention. The poem concludes with these lines: “We do not / say it will not come. It will come. // It will bring its terrible song, hum it into our houses.” The penultimate line is effectively emphatic, with the simple sentence “It will come” concluding both the line and the stanza, without however calling undue attention to itself as it would if it had formed a line by itself. This line consists of eight monosyllabic words, and arguably up to six stresses, further emphasizing the inevitability of the fever. Then the last line, a stanza of its own, slows the rhythm down, becoming almost melodic—“It will bring its terrible song, hum it into our houses”—through the softer sounds, the number of unstressed syllables, the alliteration. This last line is equally ominous yet also oddly beautiful, an effect created through both image and rhythm.

“The Disordered Body” gains significance from its position, immediately following another poem that describes yellow fever, “American Plague,” and preceding one that describes rituals of grief, “Mourning Brooch and Earrings, c. 1866.” This latter poem also begins with a reference to the body and concludes with an image of a person who “hums and threads, hums // and threads.” The humming here is different enough from the mosquito’s hum in “The Disordered Body,” however, so that the imagery remains fresh, echoing the language from other poems without defaulting to a poet’s linguistic tic.

Bodies and body parts—mouths, hair, tongues, hands—populate many of these poems, less to evoke eroticism than as signifiers of pain and loss. These are bodies that suffer and die and then are mourned through voices emerging from other bodies. Yet the book is ultimately as much about hope and longing as it is about pain and suffering. The final poem, “Late Pastoral,” describes an oil spill and its clean-up. Mourning a lost romanticized past, it opens with these lines: “How beautiful this was in the beginning: / white mulberry, Indian corn, a source // without suffering, without crime.” The speaker describes oil-covered birds, sand, fish. Then the conclusion recalls the opening lines: “How beautiful this was when the sun flickered / silver in its earnest rising. How much we want / to unstrangle the marshes, the oil-rolled shoreline, to return // to the light in the cypress, the mangrove, oxgrass. The stirring / of seabirds rising, rising.” As much as we long to return to an unspoiled paradise, we are unlikely ever to realize that dream. Yet the poem ends with ascent; sometimes individuals and even species recover.

The Wishing Tomb is Amanda Auchter’s second collection. (Her first, The Glass Crib, was published in 2011.) I hope we’ll have the opportunity to read many more.

Descent, Kathryn Stripling Byer’s sixth collection of poetry (her first, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest has also recently been reprinted by Press 53), is arranged into three sections, each exploring a different aspect of biological and cultural descent. Part I explores the lives and deaths of Byer’s ancestors, particularly her grandparents. Part II focuses on southern culture, including of course questions of race and privilege. Part III returns to more immediate, apparently autobiographical, experience, though these poems also situate themselves within the context of family.

Byer demonstrates facility with a range of forms in this collection, from free verse to sonnet sequences—many of the poems, in fact, whether in free verse or received form, are arranged as sequences. Byer seems unusually engaged with and adept at the demands of poems organized as a series or divided into sections, a strategy I appreciate. Such poems permit a poet to examine a subject from multiple perspectives, to return and return to an obsession without repeating herself.

Among my favorites is “Drought Days,” a long poem in nine sections centered in Part I. This poem explores several of the book’s central thematic concerns—belief and disbelief, what we see when we see ourselves, quotidian demonstrations of care for another, the significance of landscape. It is dedicated to the poet’s grandmother, and it examines her character and personality in a time of drought. “Rain, because prayed for,” the poem begins, “was always called God’s answer, / God being what gave / or withheld whatever we needed.” Everything comes from God, in other words, even when it doesn’t come. This opening stanza suggests the circular reasoning that almost inevitably forms a part of belief—expressing a prayer defines its fulfillment as an intentional answer in a way that expressing a wish, for example, does not. When rain follows a prayer for rain, the prayer has been answered by God. When rain follows a wish for rain, however, the wish has been fulfilled, but by whom? The speaker rebels against a God who withholds, the judgmental God whose judgments are inexplicable, and she describes her rebellion with a particularly memorable image: “God stank like a singed field.” Who would worship such a creature? Certainly not the speaker. Her grandmother does, but her grandmother would presumably describe God with different imagery. She looks out her window and sees “corn that sang when / the wind came, a husband who shoveled hay / into the cow pen, the empty yard waiting // for the child growing inside her…” “Drought Days” presents the grandmother as a woman who has both a simple life and high standards for it; the poem also develops an implied narrative as the speaker grows from a girl to a woman. In the last section, the speaker is a girl again, playing with cousins as they try to compensate for a dried-up pond. They fill an oil drum with water, pretend they’ve gone to the beach. But the “water began to smell / rusty, more tractor oil to it / than tropical coconut.” This image encapsulates the children’s identities: “We would always be / hicks. Pink and flabby like pickled / pig flesh in our grandmother’s jars.” To be persuasive, fantasy paradoxically requires some basis in reality, and tractor oil is simply too distinct from suntan lotion. Its aroma is too pervasive a reminder of their distance from the sea. The section ends with a reflection on “Soul food,” and stories that belong to others, returning the poem to its beginning. Although the speaker no longer seems to be actively rejecting her grandmother’s version of God, she nevertheless remains as excluded from the community of believers as she is from the social class of those who vacation on Myrtle Beach.

The figurative language in this poem works particularly well, as do other choices Byer makes. The lines breaks, for example, in one of the stanzas quoted above exploit the reader’s anticipation and then emphasize the children’s disappointment in their situation. Here is the full first line of the seventh stanza: “on the farm. We would always be”; the enjambment at the end could be read to encapsulate hope, but the full line, read as a line rather than parts of two sentences, undercuts that optimism, for there is no hope for change. The pessimism is confirmed with the beginning of the next line: “hicks.” Byer exploits this primary difference between poetry and prose to create layers of meaning that the sentence as simply a sentence—“We would always be hicks”—could not sustain. This final section of “Drought Days” contains 27 lines, 20 of which are enjambed. None of the line breaks calls undue attention to itself, yet they all contribute to the poem’s resonant effects. “Drought Days” is the work of a poet who understands how control of craft can significantly contribute to development of theme.

Descent contains several poems that expand the poet’s vision into a broader social realm, particularly the six-part sonnet sequence “Southern Fictions” in Part II. For me, however, the most memorable poems are those that explore the speaker’s relationships with her direct ancestors. These more personal poems remain interesting because the speaker herself seems not quite resolved on their meaning. There’s always more to be understood by the speaker—and so there’s also always more to be understood by the reader. These poems are effective because they can be known, but never completely.